Measuring Health

Worldwide economic constraints on health care systems

have highlighted the importance of evidence-based medicine and evidence-based health policy. The resulting clinical trials and health services research studies require instruments to monitor the outcomes of care and the output of the health system. However, the over-abundance of competing measurement scales can make choosing a measure difficult at best. Measuring Health provides in-depth reviews of over 100 of the leading health measurement tools and serves as a guide for choosing among them.

Now in its third edition, this book provides a critical overview of the field of health measurement, with a technical introduction and discussion of the history and future directions for the field. This latest edition updates the information on each of the measures previously reviewed, and includes a complete new chapter on anxiety measurement to accompany the one on depression. It has also added new instruments to those previously reviewed in each of the chapters in the book.

Chapters cover measurements of

physical disability, social health, psychological well-being, anxiety, depression, mental status testing, pain, general health status and quality of life. Each chapter presents a tabular comparison of the quality of the instruments reviewed, followed by a detailed description of each method, covering its purpose and conceptual basis, its reliability and validity and, where possible, shows a copy of the actual scale. To ensure accuracy of the information, each review has been approved by the original author of each instrument or by an acknowledged expert.